[GTALUG] Interesting essay on filesystem consistency

[David Collier-Brown]

On 13/12/15 10:48 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> http://danluu.com/file-consistency/
>
> I found it interesting that ReiserFS was pointed at as having amongst 
> the best handling of errors, passing them back sensibly to applications.
>
> Also interesting was that they pointed at using SQLite as a way of 
> mostly hiding applications from worrying about such troubles.
>
> Also entertaining was the notion of "MBox considered harmful"; makes 
> me like MH and Maildir all the better, as they have the merit of 
> storing a message per file, so that there's fewer concurrency issues 
> surrounding re-opening files and rewriting them.  (Possibly I'm wrong, 
> and the problem just shifts to directory metadata access...)
> -- 
> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
>
>
> ---
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Updating a mailbox is an example of using the smallest possible set of 
primitives from V6.
It was done in such a way that exactly and only one binary did the task, 
and depended only
on the atomicity of creat(O_EXCL), seek and and write.

It's surprisingly hard, much as is creating a directory entry, and is 
one of the examples we
were told to understand when studying Unix, as they were wildly 
different from OS/360 and GCOS.

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain

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